


Another Campfire Song

by LeftPawedPolarBear



Category: Outer Wilds (Video Game)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:26:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27464146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeftPawedPolarBear/pseuds/LeftPawedPolarBear
Summary: Your story begins at the end, and ends at the beginning. A cliché, even if it happens to be true. But, much more importantly—perhaps more important than anything else in the universe—your story begins, and ends, with a friend.The game plot in story form, with a lot left out and some interpretive somersaults at the end.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 21





	Another Campfire Song

**Author's Note:**

> Replayed the game, felt soft, started writing and didn't stop for about six hours. I cannot stress enough that this is JUST the plot of the game in story form. Obviously, the plot is gorgeously suited to the format in which the game tells it, so this is nowhere near a complete retelling. Just needed a way to organize my thoughts for the next time someone asks me why I love this game so much. Enjoy!

Your story begins at the end, and ends at the beginning. A cliché, even if it happens to be true. But, much more importantly—perhaps more important than anything else in the universe—your story begins, and ends, with a friend.

Slate has a campfire going, the perfect size and temperature for roasting marshmallows. You wake up just in time to see an odd flash near Giant’s Deep—you’ve been asleep under the stars, as is traditional before a pilot’s first flight. First flight! Your very first voyage as a Hearthian astronaut! Slate is amused by your excitement, but they are also understanding; they did cofound Outer Wilds Ventures, after all. They send you to retrieve your launch codes from Hornfels at the Observatory.

Your very first flight in your own spaceship… You’re nervous, and your grasp of the skills necessary to make it out and back safely is not as firm as you would like. But the Hearthians of your village have watched you grow up, and they know what you need. They are understanding and kind, if a bit wry-humored. They happily refresh your memory: how to use the Signalscope, launch your Probe, make repairs in zero-G, steer your ship. Hal is particularly excited to see you off, and triple-checks that you have the translator safely stowed in your cockpit. _Just think_ , they say, _you’ll be able to translate any Nomai text you want, anywhere you are._ The first time any Outer Wilds astronaut will be able to decipher the history of the mysterious species who inhabited this solar system long ago.

When Hornfels hands you the codes, you feel ready. When the newest addition to the museum, the strange Nomai statue brought back from Giant’s Deep by Gabbro, _turns to stare at you_ on your way out with its glowing purple eyes, you feel a bit off-balance (You're not scared, but you want to understand. That's fine; that's coming). Hal can’t explain it—the best they can do is suggest you speak to Gabbro. Nothing for it but to keep pressing onward.

Where do you choose to go on your first venture? Do you jump off the deep end, head straight to Dark Bramble or the Interloper? Do you visit one of your fellow astronauts? Gabbro on Giant’s Deep, Riebeck on Brittle Hollow, Chert on the Hourglass Twins? If you’re wise, perhaps you begin with a visit to reliable old Esker on Timber Hearth’s moon, the Attlerock.

Interestingly—and terrifyingly—you soon discover it doesn’t matter all that much where you begin, because before you know it, everything comes to an end.

…Or maybe it doesn’t. Was that all a dream? Pre-flight jitters? Slate has a campfire going, the perfect size and temperature for roasting marshmallows. You wake up, just in time to see an odd flash near Giant’s Deep—you’ve been asleep under the stars, as is traditional before a pilot’s first flight. First flight! Your very first voy—No. Not your first. You’ve done this already. You _just_ did this, you remember it perfectly. You remember your first voyage, all 22 minutes of it, before the _sun_ went _supernova_ , right before your eyes! And now…

It’s time for your first flight. But you already have the launch codes.

You begin again. And again. In part because there’s nothing else you _can_ do, but mostly because _outer space_ is _right there_ , and you’re an _astronaut_ , and 22 stale minutes out there is still more than most beings ever have.

Over countless cycles, you visit your fellow Outer Wilds adventurers. You learn the idiosyncrasies of each planet in your solar system, from the watery, windy depths of Giant’s Deep to the hilariously delicate balance of Brittle Hollow’s black hole and Hollow’s Lantern’s volcanoes, to the sandy flux of the Hourglass Twins. You learn the trick of the terrifying angler fish and the eerie not-physics of Dark Bramble, and you ride the Interloper around (and, once or twice, _into_ ) the sun. Like the astronauts who came before you, you visit the Nomai ruins on each plane. Armed with yours and Hal’s handiwork, you can hear the ruins speak for the first time.

You learn the ending to a story—not your own (not yet, you’ll get there), though you also discover a tether which connects the two. You learn about the Nomai clan who, long, long ago, followed a mysterious signal to your solar system and crashed into the Dark Bramble. Peering back through the millennia, you witness the ingenuity of the survivors, stranded on some of the least hospitable planets in your solar system—not that any of them are especially hospitable, save your own Timber Hearth—as they mourned their dead, reestablished contact between the two surviving escape pods, and set their sights back on that mysterious signal.

You learn more about the nature of the strange, phantom satellite you occasionally glimpsed through the trees on Timber Hearth as a hatchling: The Quantum Moon, as the Nomai called it, after the quantum properties it appears to possess. The Nomai postulated a connection between this Quantum Moon and the source of the signal they followed to your solar system. The signal is older than the universe itself, you learn, and the Nomai called its mysterious source the Eye of the Universe. They theorized that the Eye must be in distant orbit around your sun and that, though the Quantum Moon hops around your solar system from planet to planet, it is, in fact, the Eye’s moon. Thus, surmised the Nomai, the Eye must share some of the properties of its moon, including its quantum nature. You see that the Nomai put aside all hopes of reconnecting with the other clans spread out across space and instead focused all of their energy and ingenuity on reaching the Eye of the Universe.

(Be patient. You’ve stumbled across something big—enormous—positively Hearth-shattering. And yet, it seems that you’ve been given time—a lot of it, in fact. As much as you need. Use it. You’ll find that it’s impossible to waste it.)

The Nomai become your companions, in a way. You recognize names and connections across their various settlements. In some instances, you can even watch as individual Nomai like Poke and Solanum grow from curious youths into driven scientists and explorers over time. You become familiar with their senses of humor, some of their unique personalities. You see parents and mentors guiding the younger generations, siblings quibbling, couples falling in love. It does, on occasion, feel almost intrusive. But mostly, it feels _important_.

You learn about the religious reverence which developed around the Eye and its Quantum Moon. You learn that, while the Eye remained stubbornly out of reach, the Nomai did master its moon, after a fashion. You follow in the footsteps of your ancient, alien friend Solanum, now an adult, as she learned the principles of quantum mechanics. Eventually she was allowed to make a sacred pilgrimage to the Quantum Moon and visit its secret sixth location, which, the Nomai surmised, must be its orbit around the Eye—perhaps the closest they’d ever get to the Eye itself.

The Quantum Moon is a finicky thing, you realize. You imagine the Nomai whose skeleton you spot on the south pole probably felt the same way. Even with the lessons of quantum mechanics under your belt it takes you several tries—perhaps even several loops of trying—before you manage to coax the moon to its sixth location with the shrine located at the north pole.

You open the door onto a landscape full of the kinds of geological formations you recognize from quantum rocks you've encountered elsewhere in the solar system. You likely expected this. You almost certainly did _not_ expect to reach the south pole only to find a living(?) breathing(?) Nomai.

You’ve been following her for a long time, and now, somehow (she doesn’t quite understand it either, you learn), Solanum is waiting for you.

The Nomai are different than Hearthians, you realize. Hearthians are clever, kind, and loving, and the Nomai are all of those things, too. But the Nomai are also _big_ thinkers, ambitious, with spirits too large and too restless ever to be truly at peace. You think this must be why they are a nomadic species, and you sense the intensity with which they redirected these inclinations towards their search for the Eye. Solanum has spent the hundreds of thousands of years of her quantum life-death wondering what might happen if a conscious being entered the Eye, and you suspect most of her clan spent their lives occupied with the same kinds of questions. You feel very small, in comparison. You wonder if this larger-than-life curiosity has ever caused Nomai trouble in the past. You wonder if that trouble has ever extended to other species the Nomai have encountered, beings much more satisfied with the space they already inhabit without desperately (and sometimes thoughtlessly) reaching for more.

There are _so_ many things you don’t know, and most of them you’ll never learn. But in the moments when the universe seems too immense and dangerous and empty to bear, and you feel the tether holding you fast beginning to fray, you know you can point your Signalscope to the heavens to catch jittery Riebeck plucking confidently at his banjo on Brittle Hollow, Gabbro’s airy flute runs floating down to you from Giant’s Deep, Chert’s steady drumbeats on the Ember Twin, little Feldspar making the most alien of places, Dark Bramble, sound like home with his harmonica, and old Esker whistling a lonely but happy harmony on the Attlerock. You listen to your friends fill the vacuum of space with song, and you know that you’re lucky.

You discover that you are, in fact, lucky to have escaped the Nomai’s fate, and that they are inadvertently responsible for yours. To locate the Eye, they realized that they would need to launch probes into the farthest reaches of the solar system, each in a different direction, until one of them encountered an object matching the criteria corresponding with the Eye of the Universe.

Incredibly, when they ran into the nagging problem of infinity (they could never have sent enough probes in enough directions for one of them to encounter the Eye by chance), they simply invented time travel.

It’s warp technology, technically, not time travel. The Nomai discovered that an object which warps through a black hole to a corresponding white hole will emerge from the white hole a fraction of a moment _before_ it disappears into the black hole. So they attempted to enhance the effect. They devised a system wherein information and memories could be sent back 22-minutes in time ( _Yes_ , but please, keep listening. This is a tether, but it’s not quite the end). There are philosophical questions of memory and identity involved, some of the Nomai supposed, but they all agreed that the practical result would be a 22-minute time loop. Now, they needed only one probe, the data from which could be sent back in time to 22 minutes before the data was acquired, along with the memories of the individuals conducting the project. They could send off the same probe as many times as needed to locate the Eye, and it would only ever take 22 minutes. They just needed enough power to create the loop.

Which meant they needed to explode the sun.

They were not all of a mind on this matter, you discover. Some of the Nomai were quite reluctant to cause this star to go supernova, effectively destroying the whole solar system, all for the sake of locating the Eye of the Universe. Others argued that no, they wouldn't actually be destroying the star, that’s the beauty of the time travel! They could simply send the data back 22 minutes and bring the loop to a halt before exploding the sun that one final time. It would still be dangerous, the others responded, though they eventually conceded to the plan.

In the end, it didn’t matter. Although the Ash Twin Project was, in principle, a success—the statues could pair with the scientists and transmit their memories back in time—the Nomai failed to induce the supernova and thus failed to acquire enough power to create the time loop. The orbital probe never launched.

It got worse from there.

The Interloper, the comet in orbit around your sun, entered your solar system for the first time not long after the Sun Station failed. Ever curious, the Nomai picked themselves up off of the mat and sent a crew to investigate. Poke, Pye, and Clary landed their shuttle on the comet, and Poke and Pye ventured down into its core.

There’s likely nothing any of them could have done, you realize. The core was incredibly unstable, the ghost matter densely packed inside, and you know from your own travels that remnants can still be found in nook and crannies all over the solar system, even all these years later. One way or another, the core would have ruptured in close enough proximity to the sun, the ghost matter would have blanketed the solar system completely, and there would have been nowhere for the Nomai to hide.

Still, the sight of Poke’s body, arms desperately trying to claw her way back towards the shuttle to warn Clary and the others, leaves you shaken.

This was it, you come to understand. A single instant, probably. Every Nomai in the whole solar system: gone. Your poor friend Solanum, you realize, must have been on the Quantum Moon when the ghost matter spread, sparing one of the possible hers—the one at the sixth location—from dying. But even she, in her odd, quantum stasis, spends much more of her time dead than alive.

And now the _universe_ is dying, you learn. Through no fault of anyone in particular, it should be noted. Even the Nomai, in all of their ingenious, determined, romantic recklessness could not have brought about something this astronomical. Your poor, wonderful friends are playing a funeral dirge to the world as they know it, without knowing it. The universe had a beginning, and it will have an ending, and you, it seems, have hatched just in time for a front row seat. Or at least, you _should_ have a front row seat, but the show keeps getting jammed 22 minutes into the finale, and you seem to be the only conscious being capable of getting it unstuck.

It is, by now, quite obvious to you what has happened. After all these countless years (actually, one of the Nomai’s instruments has been keeping count, but it’s too large of a number to matter and you already feel _so_ small) the final piece of the Ash Twin Project has slid into place, thanks to a slow, steady push from Time herself. The sun went nova, along with every other star in existence, the loop began, and the probe launched. And launched again. And again. At some point, in one of the loops, Gabbro happened upon the statues on Giant’s Deep. Paired with one of them. Later—several loops later, perhaps, or maybe several hundred—you paired with another.

And you know something else, too. You’ve been to the Orbital Probe Cannon, armed with your translator, and you’ve seen that, amazingly yet predictably, given what you now know of the Nomai, the Ash Twin Project _worked_. One of the probes sent back the coordinates for the _Eye of the Universe_ , only a few hundreds of thousands of years too late to be of any use to anyone.

Well…

You could simply remove the advanced warp core from the Ash Twin Project, watch minute 22 crawl into minute 23, and let the supernova take you. You could put Gabbro out of their time-looped misery. Maybe poor Solanum would finally find some peace.

And yet…

You have the core. You have the coordinates. You’ve seen the Vessel, buried deep within the Dark Bramble. You’ve lived with these Nomai for so long by now that you can’t help but feel that some of their restless, reckless spirit has transferred to you. You point your Signalscope to the heavens and find your friends and their music, one by one. You realize you’ve already made your decision.

There was no way to expect just how different the world will feel after you remove the warp core from the Ash Twin Project. You feel entirely unmoored, untethered, but you’re also _vibrating_ with energy. The universe is dying, and you feel _alive_.

The trip through Dark Bramble is so terrifying that the warp to the coordinates you found on the Orbital Probe Cannon is hilariously anticlimactic in comparison. But the sight of the _Eye of the Universe_ hits you square in the face before you have a chance to feel disappointed and suddenly you are _here_. You see the resemblance to the Quantum Moon at its sixth location (you glance up to see if you can spot it and think you can see it out of the corner of your eye before your gaze is pulled downwards by a strange gravity that seems to be tugging at your will instead of your feet) but nothing could have prepared you for this strangeness.

You wish you could hear Esker whistling right about now.

You wish Solanum could see this.

You traverse the ever-changing terrain toward the south pole in a daze. The universe is _dying_. This will all be _over_ , as over as anything can _ever_ be. You feel the faint vestiges of Nomai spirit you inherited quaver.

(Quaver, but not fade. You _are_ still tethered, you know. And you’re almost there.)

You can’t see them through the haze that now surrounds you, but you know that all stars, including your own, are giving their last gasps right now. You can’t go back anymore, but forward doesn’t seem to be an option either. Up and down are relative.

You jump.

...

The Eye is old enough to have witnessed this universe’s birth, and it seems that it will also witness its death. After all, the Eye does what all eyes do: it sees. It witnesses. As you tumble through the depths of the Eye of the Universe, you feel witnessed. You feel watched. You feel very small.

But what you don’t yet quite understand (though you are about to—be patient just a little longer) is that you are also very, very important. The Eye is old and powerful and largely incomprehensible, but your adventures have taught you some interesting lessons about its quantum properties. The Eye is malleable, it is changeability made manifest, it is every possibility at once. It can become entangled with a conscious mind. And when the Eye stares into the abyss…

You stare back.

The Eye’s Quantum Moon takes on the properties of each planet it orbits. It is constantly coming into being anew, with new climates, new topography, and, always, new possibilities. The Eye, too, takes on the properties of that which it encounters in order to collapse _possibility_ into _being_. And now, it has encountered you. Only you, in fact, for you are all that is left.

Except…

Is that a campfire?

You see ( _see_ , do you get it?), the Eye also reflects _back_ all that it witnesses. And you learn that when the Eye sees you, it also sees much, much more. You learn this because soon, you see more, too. You see friendly old Esker, rocking comfortably in their trusty rocking chair, overjoyed to have a visitor, at last. You see Feldspar, cocky as ever, thrilled to have a reason to show off again. You see Riebeck and Gabbro and Chert, all of your brave, beautiful friends, just exactly as they appear in your fondest memories (which is, of course, exactly what they are). Your heart thuds a bit faster when you see Solanum, tall and alien, but with the hint of something deeply familiar peeking out from behind her mask.

And then you can _hear_ them, too.

That song, the one Gneiss taught you all as hatchlings, the one that filled the emptiness of space on your travels—suddenly, it fills your ears again. You almost laugh, thinking about your little toy-sized solar system at the edge of the galaxy and the end of the universe and all of the absurd coincidences and happenstances and beautiful moments of serendipity and possibility that have brought you here (Where is _here_? A complicated question with a simple answer: you’re with your friends, of course). The music fills the air, and then it _fills_ the air, becoming bigger and clearer and more solid and so, so beautiful and then—

The Eye sees, and then it reflects, and then it _becomes_. The Eye has seen you. It has heard the song in your ears, it has felt the love in your heart, it has known the wonder in your soul. And you are small, but you are also _immense_ , immense enough to fill the enormity of a conscious mind, or a whole universe. Immense enough to transform _possibility_ into _being_.

A universe.

A flash. A bang.

A beginning.


End file.
